


Too Deep to Clear Away

by signalbeam



Category: Persona 4
Genre: Camping, Denial, Friendship, Gen, Sexual Confusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-18
Updated: 2011-09-18
Packaged: 2017-10-23 20:43:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/254786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chie and Yosuke go camping together on Inaba’s mountains and bond over their mutual heterosexuality and pornographic martial arts movies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Deep to Clear Away

**Author's Note:**

> I used to have this tagged with, "I liked canon so much that I folded it like a pretzel and ate it." But then I got hungry and started eating real pretzels instead.

From this part of the mountain, Chie could see Yukiko’s house. The rocks that Chie used to play superhero on—the multiple falls and cuts, Yosuke realized, had done nothing to dissuade her from her violent hobby, and more or less confirmed his theory that Chie had hit her head on something as a child—were clustered around the Amagi’s backyard. The Inn, located just ten minutes away from those rocks, was a glittering constellation of innocent guests who didn’t know that on the side of a mountain, two teenagers were sullying their vacation by watching porn.

“Shut up about it already,” Yosuke groaned the third time she went on her spiel. He didn’t see what she was complaining about, not when he was the one carrying the portable TV. God, why did she always do this? She was the strong one, not him. Screw biology.

“What if they can see us?” said Chie.

“That’s why,” Yosuke said, gritting his teeth, “we have the tent.” He’d know. He was the one carrying it.

“Yeah, but what if they can _see_ us?” Chie said, and tugged the collar of her tracksuit up higher, clearly no longer interested in rational discussion. It was chilly, halfway into October. The more Yosuke thought about it, the dumber he felt, lugging a portable TV up a mountain so they could watch a video without anyone barging in on them. It wasn’t even the good kind of wilderness, with trees as thick as a cow, or a quiet stream with tall grass and bamboo sprouting out of the waters. Oh, no. The mountains of Inaba were scrubby, ugly rock boobs, arid at the top and marshy at the bottom. Everything was covered with dead grass, gravel, and dirt that only made the barest attempts at a color beyond “kind of brown.” Looking around, Yosuke realized that there was hardly any cover, and their tent was a bright, livid tangerine. At night, they might as well point a sign at themselves: come look at us, we’re camping.

“God, you’re always so paranoid over everything,” Yosuke said, because he knew if he started to panic, Chie would flip and kick him. The good thing about just hanging out with Chie was that _one_ of them was always rational at any given moment. The two of them seemed to balance one another, so when one was going nuts, the other was getting irritable and cranky. Yosuke was proud to say that most of the time, he was the sane one—Chie would say otherwise, but she was wrong. They only really lost their shit at the same time when Souji was around, but that was because Souji had a way of making people feel comfortable. Maybe a little too comfortable.

“I still say we should go hike _over_ the mountain,” Chie said.

“Hell no.”

“But—”

“No one’s going to see us! This was your idea, anyway.”

“It’s only my idea because you wanted to watch those videos with me!” She glared at him, and then punched his shoulder. “Idiot.”

“Well, I’m not the one who wanted to go camping,” he said. His arm smarted. He couldn’t rub the pain away because if he did, he might drop something, and then Chie would get even madder. Last week, he had picked up a few videos from the clearance bin of Junes by accident. And when he invited Chie to watch _Dragon Eater_ with him, he thought they’d just be watching a bad martial arts movie. How was he supposed to know the first scene would be of a girl choking on cock?

What he couldn’t believe was that after she stopped being all furious, she said, well, now we have to watch this, I want to know what happens. And then she said, but we’re _not_ watching this where someone might catch us. Thus, the camping gear.

“It’s a good experience,” Chie said. “I used to come up these mountains all the time. Well, not this high, but kind of high. With the dog.”

“Yukiko-san’s dog, you mean.” He had only seen the thing a few times, but it had never tried to make off with his balls. He took that as a sign.

“No, he’s our dog.”

Whoops. “That’s what I meant,” he said.

“No, you said it was hers.” Chie adjusted her pack. It clanged. She was carrying the sleeping bags and cooking supplies. God, he was not letting Chie cook dinner for them. There weren’t any hospitals nearby. “Can’t we at least go up to the top of the mountain?”

“Dude, you said we were going to go _camping_ , not hiking.” Yosuke walked to the nearest bit of level ground and said, “If we don’t stop now, it’s going to get dark. And we only have one lamp.”

“Whose dumb idea was that, anyway?” Chie said, apparently forgetting that all of the camping gear was hers because she deemed Yosuke’s to be unacceptable. But she stopped with him and helped him get his pack off. Yosuke wanted to collapse onto the ground and roll around in the dirt, but she was already hauling the tent out of the box. “Help me set this up.”

“We just spent the last five hours getting here!”

“I don’t care, just help me do this.”

His nose was freezing. He wanted to hurry up and start a campfire already before he caught a cold. It took maybe ten minutes for them to set up the tent. They split up to get firewood and stones, Yosuke heading down the mountain and Chie jogging up. By the time they returned, Yosuke couldn’t see much more of Chie than her baggy, greenish silhouette and round hair.

“How long do you think it’ll last us?” Yosuke said. Their stack of wood seemed to be made of mostly twigs and little else.

“I have a lighter log thing or two that we can use, I guess,” Chie said. “I’m freezing. Let’s get the fire started already.”

Yosuke brought a pack of matches, and broke off the heads the first eight tries, and nearly burned himself on the ninth. The tenth time, the fire caught the grass, but not the wood. He whipped out his lighter, grabbed Chie’s light-log-thing-a-majig, and got the damn thing to catch and burn.

“Total fail,” he groused, even as Chie said something about it not being a real camping experience unless they learned how to set a fire with nothing but their palms, a bundle of hair, and a stick. He bundled himself deeper into his jacket and then, shivering, detached the pan from Chie’s pack.

“Let me help,” she said.

“No, I’m good.”

“I can cook.”

“No, you can’t!” Yosuke swatted her away. When she looked almost hurt, he sighed. “Open the cans, then.”

“You don’t have to be such a jerk about it, sheesh.” But Chie pried open the cans of questionable rice-and-beans on discount from Junes, and a bit of the weird canned steak on sale at Shiroku’s. Yosuke waited for the pan to heat up, but it was taking a long time. And it was a little windy. And he swore that something was staring at them in the dark. Probably just one of Souji’s cat friends, he figured. Chie tossed in some more wood into the fire, which didn’t seem to make it get any hotter or bigger, though Chie insisted that it had an effect.

Yosuke watched her warm her fingers in the fire’s flames. She glowed soft, yellow. The rice didn’t smell too shitty, either. This was, Yosuke thought, a terrible camping trip. They should’ve just waited for Chie’s parents to go out of town and do it at her place since he had Teddie to think about at his. That’d be better than freezing out here. Geeze, it was only October. When did it get so cold?

“Maybe we should’ve gotten a room at the Inn,” Yosuke said.

“Ugh, Yosuke, you’re disgusting,” Chie said.

“I’m serious. Yukiko-san could give us room service. And then we could watch the movie while eating hamburgers.”

Chie scowled at him, and cracked her knuckles. “I don’t care how many burgers you have, Yosuke, you are _not_ asking Yukiko for room service.”

“I’m just kidding,” he said, not adding that he was sure Yukiko would love to give Chie some service. “Why so serious?”

“I mean,” Chie said, totally missing the reference, “how’d you feel if I went to Souji-kun’s house and asked him to, I don’t know, give me a foot message?”

“Who’d want to touch your feet?” Yosuke said. He stirred the rice. “It’s not like I’d ask Yukiko-san to put her hands all over me.”

“Oh, please,” Chie said. “You’d totally ask her to do that. All guys want her to do stuff to them. I’d know.”

“Yeah, I always knew you were a man under all that.”

She smacked his shoulder so hard that he nearly dropped the pan into the fire. “Ow!”

“I’m saying it’s a statistic or something,” Chie said. “Guys like girls like her. She’s pretty, smart, has great skin, looks nice in everything she wears—”

“Okay, geeze, I get it.” Yosuke didn’t add that he thought the list had sounded really gay, but apparently it was okay to say those things about other girls if you were a girl. Maybe. Rise had told him that once, but he wasn’t entirely convinced when it was Chie rattling it off. “Look, she’s not my type.”

“And she has a really small waist. But her boobs are still nice, which is so unfair, but what can you do about—”

“I told you, she’s not my type.”

“So why’d you get that movie?”

“It was an accident!” Anyway, there were tons of girls in Japan with long black hair. It wasn’t like Yukiko had a monopoly on that. _Dragon Eater_ hadn’t had any box art on it, either. He really had thought it’d just be a lame martial arts movie.

Chie tucked her knees into her chest and prodded the fire with a stick. “Yeah, right.”

“Whatever,” Yosuke said. “Dinner’s almost ready. Get the bowls out.”

“Did you bring any chopsticks?”

“I thought you did.”

“What? No, I texted you this afternoon. Look.” Chie reached into her pocket.

“Geeze, fine, you sent it, okay,” Yosuke said. He poured the rice and beans and steak into the bowls, and set the pan aside. Great. They’d just drink this like soup. “Do you have reception?”

“Not really. What if we end up dying up here and no one finds our bodies for like, a month—and then they’re going to go, ‘why were they watching dirty stuff like this all the way up here’ and no one’s going to know that it was your—”

“Lay off already,” Yosuke said. “We’re not going to die, we can see Yukiko’s house from here. And no, just because we can see her doesn’t mean that your girlfriend can see us.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “She’s not—I’m straight, you know.”

“Yeah, me too,” Yosuke said, blowing on the top of his bowl to keep it from getting too hot.

“I mean, I’ve had boyfriends—”

“What?”

“You haven’t?” Chie said. She looked surprised for a moment. Then she just looked kind of like she pitied him, which was a million times more annoying. “Well, it’s not that surprising. And it’s perfectly normal. I’m sure you’ll find someone who doesn’t think you’re a total idiot. Ugh, why is the meat crunchy?”

“It’s edible, okay.” Yosuke drained his soup, and refilled his bowl. Well, he was sure that if he lived out in Inaba all his life, he’d at least have one date. Not like there was anything else to do out here, anyway. But if he said that, he knew Chie would put her foot through his face. “So what, do you have a boyfriend now?” he said.

Chie tossed in another few branches into the fire. Yosuke guessed he could see what people saw in her. Kind of. She had a nice body, for a girl. If she were his type—which she wasn’t—then he’d probably go for it, ‘it’ being crazy, violent chicks who were probably into dressing up like ninjas in bed or something. He tried to imagine Chie all blushing and bashful like a girl should be, but that made his head hurt, and he decided to stop trying. “There’s no real time for it right now, you know?” she said.

“Yeah,” Yosuke said. “I never had much time to go looking, either.” He was just going to ignore the whole Saki thing. He liked her a lot. But now—well, it didn’t seem to matter as much. And that made him sound heartless and cruel, but it was true. Sometimes around Souji he’d start thinking about Saki nonstop, but the more he thought about it, the more Saki seemed to fade away. And other people were becoming more and more… solid, he guessed. No one in particular, but just—people, in general.

“Some of the guys were real jerks,” she said, and oh, god, was she taking that as an invitation to do girl talk? Yosuke wasn’t a girl, and he didn’t want to know the details of her dating life. “I mean, I think half of them just wanted to get Yukiko through me, and the others were just horny.”

Yosuke, finished with his food, set the bowl on the ground. “Great,” he said.

“I mean, I guess I was also—”

“Okay! I don’t need to know!”

“No wonder you can’t get a girl.” Chie was done with her dinner, too. They both looked down at their knees. The fire was too small. Their backs were cold.

“How are we going to wash the dishes?” Yosuke said.

“We can stop by the river later.”

“The river’s like, an hour away.”

“That’s why I said later.”

This was getting nowhere. Yosuke, more and more, felt as though he should have just stayed home. But they shared a canteen, and put away the bowls and pan in Ziploc bags so ants couldn’t get to it, and put the fire out. Yosuke figured that if he had to do something this stupid, at least he was doing it with a friend.

 

*

The truth was, by now, Yosuke didn’t really care about the movie. He just wanted to crawl into his sleeping bag, stay warm, and maybe go to sleep. But Chie, crazy as always, said, “Come on, this is the whole point of this entire trip!” and popped the batteries into the portable TV and fed the DVD into the slot below.

“The screen’s like ten centimeters across,” Yosuke said, as the TV flickered to life.

“I told you, we’re not watching this somewhere where someone might run into us.” Chie had brought two bags of kettle corn, which were, miracles of miracles, not only uncrushed, but still tasty. She popped the first bag open, and offered Yosuke a handful.

“Well, we could’ve done it while your parents were out visiting someone.” The movie was starting. The same scene that had scandalized Chie a couple of weeks earlier reappeared: a misty mountain, a dojo, a Zen garden, and then an abrupt cutaway to a girl with long black hair getting a dick in her mouth.

“No, those are my days with Yukiko.” Chie, for good measure, had brought toothpicks. Smart.

“That’s what I’m saying. We watch this in the afternoon, and you can spend the rest of the evening with Yukiko.” He didn’t see what was so wrong with this, but Chie gave him a look that conveyed the depths of her disdain for his obviously inept and doomed plan, so he let it drop. He wished Souji were here, but even then he wasn’t sure if that’d be a good idea. He had to impress Souji, not gross him out by watching a girl get her face covered in jizz, or saying, “Is that cock even real? How is she not choking?” And Kanji would’ve flipped and no way he was watching this with Teddie. As much as it pained him to say it, Chie was the closest thing he had to a bro.

“Oh my god, they’re trying to do plot,” Chie said. “Is that normal? Do most movies like this have plot?”

“I don’t know,” Yosuke said. “It’s not like I’m watching them all the time.”

“Why is she trying to have sex with the ninja when he’s invisible?”

“Beats me.” Seeing a girl pretending that she was getting fucked by some invisible dick was so not arousing. Yosuke curled back into his sleeping bag, more focused on Chie than the movie, which was boring and stopped surprising him ten minutes in. But Chie seemed entertained enough by it, watching with alternately narrowed and widened eyes. As the invisible ninja switched to a dildo—thank god, this they could actually see—Chie winced and closed one eye.

“Does it really hurt that much?” Yosuke said as the dildo sank into the girl. Whatever her name was. He had to keep talking. The more he talked, the less likely it’d be that he’d fall asleep. If he fell asleep, Chie would probably think he was getting off on this.

“I guess she’s acting,” Chie said. “But still.”

The girl was crying now. And the thing was barely halfway in, with plenty left to go. Was this for real? Maybe they were just getting duped. “So how much can girls take?”

“I’m not talking about this with you,” Chie said, reddening. She clutched the kettle corn bag to her chest, and winced again as several more centimeters of rubber cock vanished inside the girl.

“So you _have_ done it before.”

“Yosuke—”

“It’s not a bad thing,” Yosuke said quickly, before she could hit him. “I mean, I haven’t. And I bet partner hasn’t.”

“No, he has,” Chie said.

Yosuke frowned. “He would’ve told me.”

“He’s just really discreet. He’s not the kind of guy who talks about sex all the time.”

“What, you’re saying that I am?” Yosuke said, ignoring the sting of Souji apparently banging his way through Inaba without telling him.

“Well,” Chie said, gawking at the screen as the girl now rode on the massive thing, breasts swinging left and right, “it’s not like I would’ve come up here by myself.”

He couldn’t focus on the movie while he was thinking about Souji; it was throwing him off in a way that was threatening to give him one hell of a headache. “Wait, who is he doing?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t look.”

“Then how did you know it was Souji, did you keep your ear on the door while he did–ow!” She smacked him with the kettle corn bag. Bits of popcorn went flying. “Geeze! I just want to know!”

“It’s none of your business how I knew!”

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Yosuke said. This time she walloped him with a pillow. “Argh!”

“I told you, I’m not seeing anyone right now!” Chie took another swing at him with the pillow, but it bounced off his forearm. “It isn’t Yukiko, either,” she said. “So don’t even think about it.”

He hadn’t been. Geeze. “Well, I bet he’s having fun,” Yosuke said.

Chie returned her attention to the screen. “That’s what it sounded like.”

Yosuke stood up. The girl was convulsing around the dildo while the ninja came all over her face. “I have to pee,” he said, and stepped out of the tent.

The moon was up, and the sky was nearly clear. A few small clouds drifted past the stars; and as for the stars themselves, he could see maybe a hundred, give or take. From here, Inaba looked small and rustic, hemmed in by the glassy rice paddies extending to the north and west, cut off by the mountains on the eastern side, in danger of being swallowed up by the plains in the south. Junes, even at night, was the biggest and brightest spot in Inaba; but it also was strangely garish and ugly from this spot on the mountains, in a way that made him wonder how he had never noticed it from the street.

He didn’t care about who Souji was sleeping with. Maybe Souji was sleeping with too many people to divulge to even his best friend. But it still drove him nuts, thinking about Souji going off somewhere, kissing someone else, someone else’s hand feeling up Souji’s dick, someone else as the center of Souji’s attention. And it was totally normal to think of Souji this way. Just look at how defensive Chie got whenever anyone suggested touching Yukiko. But even when he thought that, he knew—he didn’t know how—that they were weird, this was weird, everything about their lives, the TVs and the murders, wasn’t nearly as strange and uncomfortable and weird as this.

He took a piss on a rock shaped like Elvis, and headed back into the tent.

“What took you so long?” Chie said, her eyes still fixed on the screen. “You weren’t—were you?”

“Who’d get turned on by this?” Yosuke said. Was this really his life, talking about his potential boners with girls? “Do you like it? You like it.”

“Shut up, Yosuke.” She took a swipe at him with a pillow. “It’s not that I _like_ it, I’m just—”

“Turned on?”

“Ew, why did you have to go and just say it?”

“Come on, you’re the one who started it.” But now he wasn’t sure who started what. He sat on top of his sleeping bag instead of crawling into it. And Chie kept checking him out—probably to see if he had any wood, but Yosuke could think that maybe, just maybe, she liked him in a way that wasn’t related to her love of doing immense violence.

“Come here,” Chie said, her voice scratchy and kind of tense. The tent wasn’t tall enough to stand up in, so he waddled over on his knees. He half-expected her to kiss him, but for a moment they just stared at each other.

“You’re going to make me kiss you, aren’t you?” Yosuke said.

“Well, if you don’t want to,” she huffed.

“You can’t just wait for me to do it, what if _I_ don’t want to?”

“Don't be stupid, Yosuke. Are we going to or not?” She had her fingers in his collar, and he had his palm on her waist, and he guessed that they were going to do it, because otherwise Chie would punch him in the face for being handsy. So they kissed, and it wasn’t awful. And the other option was watching this movie, so he guessed this wasn’t too bad. They broke off the kiss, and Yosuke, for a moment, could see himself in Chie’s eyes—and then saw Chie herself, the calmness in her expression and the resignation in her shoulders. He turned away. Her hand fell back to her side.

“No offense,” Chie said, “but you haven’t been kissed much, have you?”

“I’ve been kissed a million times, shut up.” Yosuke crawled back into his sleeping bag. Chie sidled a little closer to him, and rested her elbow on his stomach. “Don’t do that. I can’t see anything.”

“It’s not like you like the movie, anyway,” Chie said.

Yeah, but if Chie stayed on him for too long, he was going to get a bruise on his stomach. He tried to push her off, but then she dug the pointy end of her elbow into his belly button and he gave up. He reached up and pet her hair, and it was only maybe half as creepy as he thought it’d be. They didn’t have anything to say, or maybe it was that there was nothing left to say when they were watching a girl getting spit roasted on screen. God, that looked painful. Why did they make her take it up the ass?

He kept looking over at Chie, hoping that something her face or body would tell him how he was supposed to feel about this, but she wasn’t paying attention to him. Her brow was furrowed almost the entire time, as though she had injured something. He hoped that it was her shoulder so she’d get off of him already.

When the movie was over, Yosuke reached over to the TV and knocked the battery loose. The only light came from the moon, distant and cold, and the lamp. Chie still looked thoughtful, or maybe annoyed, as though the movie, plotless, cheap piece of crap that it was, was bothering her on some philosophical level. Geeze, she didn’t have to think so hard about it. He gave her a little push that brushed past her breast. Chie turned to him, mouth open in irritation; then instead of saying something, her expression softened, and she caught him by the chin.

It almost came naturally this time. And the rest of it did, too. Clothes rustling away, thoughts tumbling into justifications in the dark.

 

*

 

In the morning, they went up to the top of the mountain, mostly because Chie said so. The entire way up smelled like rice and beans, and his clothes were haunted by a damp, musky odor. Yosuke hoped that they’d make it back in town before dinner, because they had only brought enough food for breakfast and a granola bar lunch.

Even though the night had been cold and the morning not much warmer, he and Chie still worked up a sweat when he got to the top. It wasn’t really a tall mountain, Yosuke noted, but still, he felt accomplished. Not that he was telling Chie that. If he did, she’d make him do something really crazy. Maybe climb not just to the top of the mountain, but then _over_ it.

“I wish we could stay here forever,” Chie said.

“Hell no,” Yosuke said. “I want an actual bed.”

“Well, we could just take your bed up here.”

“You’d need to bring the entire house up, first.” He set his pack on the ground and fell into the hard mountain ground, not caring that he was getting dirt in his hair and on his clothes. Fuck it. He was mountain climbing. He could do it if he wanted to. A second later, Chie joined him on the ground, letting out a loud sigh as she did so. He looked over at her. How was she, he wondered, not sore? Ugh, he didn’t want to think about it.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” Chie said. “But it’s kind of lonely doing it by yourself, you know?”

“My legs hurt,” Yosuke said. “Get someone else to do it with you next time.”

“I’m just saying it’s nice having you with me. Idiot.” She stuck her hands deep in her pockets. Her nose and ears were red from the cold, but she looked happy. She sat up, and brushed the dirt off of her elbows. “You know, last night—”

“Yeah,” Yosuke said quickly.

“That’s the only time it’s ever happening,” she said. “There isn’t going to be a next time.”

“Same,” Yosuke said. “I think you chipped my tooth. Were you trying to break my jaw when we were making out?”

“Your teeth are perfectly fine, stop complaining,” she said, and punched him in the side. He swore, and curled into a ball. “It’s not because you were bad at it. Aside from the whole first time thing.”

“You’re not a guy,” Yosuke said, bluntly. “Not that I’m gay or anything.”

He thought she was going to roll her eyes at him, or maybe she'd laugh and make him feel better by telling him that it was really gay and he should just give in already. But her chin fell to her chest, and rolled onto her side so her back was facing him. “You just want that one guy, huh.” It was uncomfortable and thrilling, how they both knew what the other person was feeling. Maybe they only got along so well because they were similar, or at least, they were normal, compared to beautiful girls who were training themselves up to be business owners, or mama’s boys with tattoos and nose rings, or national idols, or cross-dressing detectives, or weirdly perceptive boys who popped their collars and had really big swords.

“I’ll tell him when it’s all over,” Yosuke said, raising his fist in the air.

“Yeah, that sounds great,” Chie said.

“Geeze, can’t you sound a little happier for me?”

Yosuke poked her, right between the shoulder blades. Chie popped up to her feet, so fast that Yosuke yelped in surprise. “All right, I’ve decided! I’ll tell her when you tell him!”

“That just makes it more stressful for me,” he said. “Can't you do it on your own schedule?”

“And I’ll take you climbing every day until you confess!”

“Oh my god, Chie, don’t, just don’t,” he groaned. She nearly yanked his shoulder out when she helped him back to his feet, and either way, he swore that his back cracked. Chie slung her pack back on, and pointed, blindly, to the south.

“Over there’s the Samegawa,” she said.

“What? How do you know?” he said.

“I just do, okay?” she said, which put Yosuke instinctively on his guard, because they were almost out of water, and he didn’t want to spend the rest of it chasing after some invisible river. “Look, you can see the Samegawa going through the Inn over there. If we head that way, I'm sure we'll find it.”

“That’s the worst logic I’ve ever heard from you,” he said. “Let’s just do the dishes when we hit the floodplains again.”

“That’s so long from now, though,” she huffed. She walked fast and soon left him behind, but about ten minutes along the way, she stopped and waited for him to catch up. She cocked her head off to the side, and grinned, brash and ribbing, but only in good humor. “You’re slow, aren’t you?”

“You wish,” he said, and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

She laughed, and put her hands on her hips. “It’s good for you. Makes you strong.”

“You don’t need to get any stronger,” he said.

She blushed, and then looked away. “Neither do you.”

Geeze. He was getting all red, too. “I always knew I was a lady killer,” he said, winking.

“Ew, no. Get over yourself.” She punched him again, but lightly.

The rest of the trip went by easily. They talked about movies, real movies, their friends, strange bits of gossip that had made their way to them. They talked about normal things, like normal friends. And at the end of the day, when it was sunset and they were trying to get bits of bean off of the pan in the Samegawa, he looked up and saw her, golden and scuffed up, against the sun, and realized that they could have loved each other more, maybe, in some other world in some other place. He didn’t know. And once they got out of the river, they probably wouldn’t talk like they had on the mountain. They’d let the matter drop and fall away, and go back into themselves, like what they were going through only ever happened to one person at a time.

And was that so bad? They had other friends to talk to and other people to work their issues out with. They were good friends, sure, but sometimes he couldn’t stand Chie, and sometimes she liked using him as a moving target for her new martial arts moves. And it was kind of sad seeing someone else stuck on the same thing you were.

“I got some American movies at home,” he said. “You want to come over this weekend?”

“I have plans with Yukiko then,” she said. “Maybe the week after?”

“Partner and I are going to Okina.”

“Let's do it after midterms,” she said. She wiped the pan dry with a damp cloth, and hooked the pan back onto her backpack. “Anyway, I’m going home.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Me too. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”

She smiled, waved, and left. Her hair stuck up in the back; they had both forgotten to bring combs. Yosuke watched her becoming smaller and smaller. He looked across the plains, back to the mountains, the shimmering Samegawa river. He didn’t feel alone out here, even though he hadn’t seen anyone besides Chie pass by in hours, and even though the only living creatures out right now were the cats and maybe some annoying bugs who didn’t know that winter would be coming soon. He dunked his face in the cold river water, rubbing his face until his skin turned nearly white and lips red. No matter how long he stayed below the surface of the water, his resolve stayed uncertain and terrifyingly liquid inside him. But he couldn’t not say anything. Who knew when the murders would be done? They could all be dead tomorrow. He dried his face on his shirt, teeth chattering and his whole torso shivering. He picked up his pack, and left the floodplains. At the fork in the road, he turned not for his house, but towards the red line of the horizon, where Souji was.


End file.
